New Jerseytimes Online

From 1995 to 1999, the Office of Television and Radio (now I-TV) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick produced the award-winning radio program New Jerseytimes, a weekly half-hour, magazine-style radio program that examined current issues facing New Jersey within the context of the state’s history. It was the only continuously broadcast radio series in the region which focused on the historical forces that have shaped the state’s past and continue to influence its present. Each episode provided historical perspectives interpreted by scholars and experts illustrating how events, attitudes, traditions, and the people of New Jersey’s past contributed to current conditions. Over the course of five years of production of the original radio series, over 145 individual stories were produced for New Jerseytimes, plus book reviews and commentaries, and the series was heard by a tremendously diverse population throughout the tri-state area. With placements on commercial and noncommercial stations, New Jerseytimes reached thousands of people who did not normally seek out historic programming about the state in their homes, cars, places of work, and recreation sites.

In 2008, with the support of the New Jersey Historical Commission, the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience redesigned the New Jerseytimes Online website into an updated, interactive tool, and uploaded thirteen audio stories, plus two commentaries by Institute director, Dr. Clement Price to the new website. The website navigation includes background information on the series and each story, and enables the visitor to listen to the stories as they were originally produced for the radio series. The New Jerseytimes Online website offers internet users access to the great wealth of scholarly and historical material generated by the original radio series, readily available to students, teachers, and scholars of New Jersey History via the internet.